I’m a firm believer in the adage “you get what you pay for.” However, I also can’t deny the incredible value being put out onto the Internet for free by some very talented people. With the decreasing costs of web conferencing software from the likes of Calliflower, DimDim, PalBee and Rondee, offering webinars has never been easier or more affordable. Webinars these days can include audio, video and slide presentations, some with audience participation, and be either live or on-demand.

In order to showcase their apps and services, many of these web conferencing companies offer free or affordable webinars on a variety of business topics to lure in new customers. Additionally, some companies hold free webinars to showcase their expertise. Either way, there are more and more free webinars offered every day. You can use them to gain knowledge from credible consultants, authors and other experts.

A caveat: When companies have something to sell, their webinars may tend to be skewed toward their products. Go for the webinars that include diverse topics and especially those where the experts are not from within the host company.

Here are some webinars on topics that can help you with your work.

1. Webinars on WebEx — free sessions hosted by experts using WebEx software. Upcoming webinars include a WebEx Q&A where you can ask a WebEx expert about holding large virtual events on December 8, 2009 and on December 15, “Reward & Recognition on a Limited Budget” led by Senior Consulting Partner Mark Paskowitz of The Ken Blanchard Companies.
2. New Marketing Labs — Coming up December 3 is “Measuring Success in Social Media” from the team at this reputable social media consulting firm led by Chris Brogan.
3. Radian6’s Twebinars — Sample topics include case studies of “engaged brands” like communications company Mullen and beverage company Molson Coors.
4. Sustainable Industries — This magazine holds free webinars about the issues of sustainability for anybody wanting to reduce their carbon footprint both (in both their personal and professional lives) as well as to learn about the latest trends in sustainability.
5. The IRS — Yes, even the IRS has gotten on the webinar bandwagon! Topics include tips on e-filing, tax updates (often based on specific states), and IRS Disaster Assistance.
6. Hubspot — While I do not endorse the Hubspot product, it does offer useful archived webinars like “5 Tips for Advanced B2B Business Blogging” and “How to Use Social Media to Manage Your Company Brand Online” There are also live webinars.
7. Awareness Networks — Watch archived videos of webinars with such industry leaders as Paul Gillin and Brian Solis.
8. Marketing Profs — For an annual membership fee, you can access archived webinars on topics ranging from “Monetizing the Long Tail of Search: Rethink Your Keyword Strategy” and “Love or Marketing? How Word-of-Mouth Will Save Your Brand.” Marketing Profs also holds live webinars including webinars on how to succeed with webinars.
9. Constant Contact — This email marketing company offers live webinars on email marketing, event marketing and online surveys. (Disclosure: I am a paying customer of Constant Contact).
10. Small Business Administration — The SBA has a series of small business training webinars covering finance and accounting, business planning and business startup, among other topics. You can also find webinars offered for free by local SBAs by state.

Virtual events company On24 takes webinars a huge leap further by sponsoring — and providing the platform for — virtual summits such as last month’s Social CRM Virtual Summit, essentially an all-day series of webinars and webcasting.

Webinars are a convenient way to learn best practices, hear case studies and hear from some of the world’s top experts in their field, all from the comfort of your office, your home or anywhere.

What webinars have you attended that you recommend?

If you want to run a successful buisiness in these climates you’ve got to cut costs, cut costs and cut costs. I asked our accountant to have a look at where the thought we were spending more than we ought to, and he came back with travel as being a massive drain on our resources. With a staff of just 40 we were spending almost 6 figures a year on travel. We are a client facing buisiness, buying contracts from across the globe, as well as meeting clients nationwide. So when Web conferencing was reccomended to me, I thought Id have a look to see if it would be appropriate to replace some of our more expensive and time consuming meetings. Is was considering webex, but in the end I went for a webex alternative called gotomeeting.
So I had a look at the software available online for meetings, and found GoToMeeting to be a good compromise between cost, features and ease of use. With a free 30 day trial, it seemed like a good idea to at least try it out. I was very impressed with the easy install, and would recommend it to even the most tech savvy. Hopefully WebEx will also start supplying a free trial, or some kind of alternative arrangement. You can get some feedback on what users are thinking on this gotomeeting review on the online meeting forum.

Online Educa, Berlin, 2-4 December 2009, booth D127 – Wacom will showcase its range of products for online education and webconferencing at Online Educa in Berlin.

With Wacom’s products the user can  intuitively add handwritten content, drawings and highlights to digital documents, presentations or digital whiteboard solutions. Wacom’s interactive pen displays allow to directly a digital pen on the screen. Wacoms’s interactive tablets offer flexible solutions for different applications. With the use of Wacom products teachers and students alike profit from effective online learning sessions that result in a higher teaching quality. The possibility to directly comment on documents, develop handwritten mathematical formulas for example and integrate direct feedback adds another valuable dimension to online teaching and learning.

During the exhibition, Peter Sommer, General Business Development Manager,  will be one of the experts in a panel session “Putting the Web to Work in Class – Practical Tips and New Ideas” which takes a look at the extensive web resources available to educators to take advantage of the opportunities available. Peter Sommer’s contribution will be entitled “Handwriting, an old concept? Benefits of electronic pen input devices in e-learning sessions” and will take place on Thursday 3 December at 2.30pm.  For more details click here.

The Ministry of Instructional Design

As I write this I am participating in two exciting courses. Each course is an example of how new paradigms for course delivery are coming to the fore in this online world. I will probably write more about both of them in the near future, but will kick off today with just a simple explanation of both courses.

Rapid eLearning Development
LearningAge Solutions has developed an online course about Rapid eLearning Development. I am a participant in the pilot group: I don’t have a course fee to pay, but have committed myself to giving weekly feedback so that the course can be fine-tuned.

The “Ministry of Instructional Design” (LearningAge Solutions)

Part 3D computer game, part social network, part collaborative learning, the ReD course will teach you how to build effective elearning and informal media using leading elearning author tools.

Designed by Rob Hubbard of LearningAge Solutions with input from some of the smartest people in the elearning industry including Clive Shepherd, Jane Hart and Patrick Dunn. This is a course unlike any other,  designed to show how great elearning can be and built using tools that you too can master.

The way that this course is created/structured is smart and inspiring (regardless of the content which is good too). The course is made from a loosely coupled set of (mostly) free online web applications.

The core of the course is a private Ning network which has links to all the other parts of the course. This is the place where participants do reflective blogging and where people hand in their assignments and comment on other people’s assignments.

Mindmeister is used for mindmaps that contain the learning objectives for each module, ClassMarker contains a couple of knowledge checks/assessments, Dimdim delivers the web conferencing functionality and there is a 3D game made with the gaming technology from Thinking Worlds.

To me this type of course design shows that it is not necessary to assume that one single tool should deliver the full learner experience. It is perfectly viable to use a collection of tools and use each for its strengths. Once I have finished the course I will post a bit more about my experiences.

Connectivism and Connective Knowledge

This is the second year that George Siemens and Stephen Downes (actually my two favourite learning gurus) organise the  ”rather large open online course” Connectivism and Connective Knowledge. It is their attempt to destabilise the concept of a course.

The course is open to anyone. You attend freely if you do not need any university course credits, or you pay if you do. The course is decentralised (or maybe “loosely federated” is a better word): the two facilitators set out reading materials and organise a couple of webcasts every week, but the meat of the course is to be found in the discussions that participants have (online in Moodle forums) and the reflections that participants post on their blogs.

A single tag, CCK09, is used by all participants for their posts. This pulls the all the course activity together and makes it easy to find course related postings (e.g. on Twitter or in the blogosphere). By connecting to people with similar interests, it is possible to go on a tangent and explore the things that you want to work on in relation to connectivism and connective knowledge.

A daily newsletter is sent out. This is an edited version of the aggregated posts and discussions and includes commentary by Stephen Downes. Just reading the newsletter is already incredibly valuable.

I tried to actively participate in this course last year, but was not able to keep up with it. It requires a lot of discipline to study this way: there is no passive consumption of information. Instead it requires a lot of effort to select what you want to read and post your reflections. I hope I will be able to do better this year (although things are already not looking good right for that to be the case)!

We met this month at ACHIEVA on the South Side. We will be at this location for the rest of 2009.

We discussed Microsoft SharePoint quite a bit during the meeting.  We determined that:

• It is a good tool for an Intranet.
• It must be well-planned out before implementation.
• It is ideal for sharing files and forms across an organization.
• You can use it to replace paper newsletters (internal only, obviously)
• It can be connected to Exchange server.

Here are the various other resources discussed during this month’s meeting:

• Dim Dim – free web conferencing for up to 20 people – http://www.dimdim.com/
• IP Chicken – tells you your IP address – http://www.ipchicken.com/
• Office 2010 – coming soon, God help us all – http://www.microsoft.com/office/2010/
• Schneider Downs – has an off-the-shelf board portal software package – http://www.schneiderdowns.com/
• Business Library – has a tech login and discounted online trainings, including certifications – http://www.bizlibrary.com/
• SpeakEasy – for clocking your Internet connection speed – http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/

Our next meeting will be held at ACHIEVA on the South Side, on November 4. Please note that we are now holding our meeting from 8:30 – 10 am each month.

The Bagels & Bytes 2009 Calendar (including directions) is here.

I was catching up with my Google Reader this morning and caught some drama. Apparently WebEx said some things about DimDim that were inaccurate which got DimDim railed up. I discussed the event with the CEO of a tech company from Silicon Valley. Here’s some advice I was given: “never knock the competition”.

If you are attacked and the competition makes a false claim you don’t load up on ammo, you simply state your side and the facts that support your side and your company.

Unless you love the drama and you are a fiesty brand that will never give up, and has a community to turn to for support… I guess go ahead if you must.

That’s exactly how DimDim started out when CEO DD Ganguly announced at Demofall07 that they will kill Webex. “Webex is history” he said.

Although company drama does make for good publicity and is exciting to read about, it’s probably wise to avoid it and never stand in the middle of it.

Right now Dimdim is playing the “he said, she said” highschool game. To me it looks like they are trying to play innocent. They’re turning to the community for support hoping that they could help gang up on WebEx and attack for them while they sit back and act like this wasn’t expected.

Many are waiting for retaliation or just an explanation from WebEx, but they are remaining quiet right now. What do you think about all this?

Read more about it here on DimDim’s Blog

With online media and software on the rise, virtual e-learning teams manage projects and collaborate on content development regardless of their geographic location. Both managers and employees have certain habits or characteristics that make them effective virtual workers. This webinar explores those habits or characteristics, the collaborative software needed to work effectively, and methods for working in a virtual team.

Please join soon as space is limited!

Hi me tudo! Mais um lindo dia para se pensar.

“O dinheiro é tudo para aquele que não tem futuro.”

Autor

Hidemitsu Gonçalves Hashimoto

]]> http://tucksoon.wordpress.com/2009/08/20/dimdim-works-great/ Thu, 20 Aug 2009 13:36:03 +0000 tucksoon http://tucksoon.wordpress.com/2009/08/20/dimdim-works-great/

Today I tried Dimdim to host a mini web conference with a few students for the first time. We had a lot of fun messing around with the functions. Haha.

Pros:

1. It’s free!
2. It does not require any software download and installation.
3. It allows 20 concurrent users.
4. It has a few presentations modes – Whiteboard, Computer screen, PowerPoint and Webpage.
5. It is fast and does not lag.

Cons:

1. I am still learning some features, particularly the audio and visual controls. Can be a little tricky.
2. Nothing at the moment!

I strongly recommend all educators to try Dimdim with their students and fellow teachers for web conferencing, home-based learning and hosting of webinars. Although it may seems like a poor man’s Elluminate, it certainly exceed all my expectations.

So many clients of mine hesitate when I suggest “free” – social media programs, free software trials – it doesn’t matter – they don’t see the value in things that don’t cost money. Don’t make the same mistakes.

YOU DON’T NEED EXPENSIVE WEBSITES, EMAIL MARKETING PROGRAMS OR THOUSAND-DOLLAR DIRECT MAIL BUDGETS. 

Not when you’re first starting out anyway.

When you’re starting up, be creative – find the free. Do more with less. Concentrate on providing value to your clients. Keep your focus. As you grow, so will your marketing budget. The fancy website can wait.

Some free and/or low-cost apps that I use and highly recommend:
- http://www.zoomerang.com (survey tool)
- http://www.vistaprint.com (their free business cards can’t be beat for getting your business up and running in a hurry)
- http://www.mailchimp.com (email marketing – they have great templates and allow you to mail to a list of up to 100 records in “free trial” mode)
- http://www.dimdim.com (web conferencing application – great competitor to WebEx and GoToMeeting) 
- http://www.freeconference.com (conference call application – Dimdim also offers this functionality – but I remain a FreeConference fan)

An online webinar meeting with the class via Dim Dim last Wednesday was an excellent way to demonstrate the power of an online meeting place, plus a great way to showcase the current office technologies for the class. 

I like how it’s easy to use, however it is not as robust as WebEx. Also the free version lacked the capacity to have the system call your phone, like WebEx does. But it’s free to use, so I’m not complaining.

I am really amazed by how many free tools there are out there. I am all for open source, freeware and sharing of ideas. But like many people, I am guilty of not wanting to donate when donations are requested. I wonder how these companies’ business model works! Advertising?

I can also say creating these free services/pay for use services  in a way is a like a live resume. Companies like these can capture the attention of bigger rival companies, and eventually these companies might get bought out by bigger companies.  That means bank for the founders!

As an early stage business we have been very impressed at the highly capable and affordable IT systems out there. It’s ever changing but this is our snapshot on 14th July 2009 …

Before going out on our own, in our past firms we used to have IT departments and PCs running microsoft. In fending for ourselves, we’ve been so impressed by some of the great IT that’s available for early stage businesses and usually very surprised by how inexpensive it all is.

Using Basecamp as Collaborative Project Management Software

Here’s just some:-

Background – our organisation is 5-10 computer persons in size and flexes up and down subject to projects. We’re coming at it with PCs or Macs for individual users, very often with people working from home or other offices. We are not using a company server.

Teleconferencing – we use Skype daily, it is certainly useful for teleconferences with employees, and its free. For something with a slightly more professional feel then powwownow has been good. It’s free to set up an account, the price is in the calls.

Screen-sharing – we use this less frequently, and at the moment generally use dimdim. We started with mikogo but at the time it needed a .exe which wasn’t suitable for the Mac guys on our team. Similarly other systems have spread into this field, including skype.

CRM – Customer Relationship Managment – contact databases etc – currently using Highrise. Generally started with Outlook on individul PCs but the step to share contacts was not intuitive, was unreliable and seemed to require an upfront outlay. Highrise can be free to use initally and then rises to $12 and $24 etc per month packages subject to requirements. It’s good enough for sharing, recording and searching information. To date at Sapien we haven’t had a requirement for large, controlled marketing campaigns, at one client we use Sugar for this, we continually consider trialling salesforce.

Finance Software – there’s lots of PC packages which seem just enough when you get going – Quicken, MS Money etc, even Excel – in the early stages is there that much information that needs to be networked here? In the end though we have been very impressed with KashFlow. It’s a SaaS (software as a Service system). Typical price approx £15 per month and offers a 60 day free trial. It’s very easy to pick-up, is UK accounts focussed, offers some good reports and offers remote access to users. In a number of businesses in the past we have used full-blown MRP (Manufacturing Requirements Planning systems) when running procurement and manufacturing projects. MRP can be an expensive overkill when all we needed was the ability to raise and track purchase orders, for which Kashflow is great – and by default it is already integrated with our finance system.

File-sharing – for straightforward file sharing across a group, dropbox. Synchronisation very stragihtforward. Again starting out is free.

Project Management – for this BaseCamp. Its another 37Signals programme (as is Highrise). Typical fees are $12, $24 per month. It makes running a project in one electronic place no matter where everyone is based geographically or corporaterly very straightforward. Discussions, file-sharing automatically connected to user emails are the most common things we use. It then provides a very useful electronic track record of what happened on the project. It does have other functionality like task-lists but managing this could easily be a distraction from what matters on the project.

Collaborative Documents – since some of us are Mac and some MS users we do use Googledocs. For us, Google has become another arena to save Word-type documents and collaborate on them. It hasn’t the functionality of MS word e.g. range of formatting abilities but it provides enough for useful collaborative benefits. However the lack of functionality on the Google spreadsheet and powerpoint equivalents has meant these haven’t gained traction in our business.

[wp-cumulus]

Schade unter WordPress.com gibt es keine kostenfreien plugin’s. Daher auch keine Wolke!

This week has been full of NZEI e-mails, Ministry missives full of  information and strategies that fall short of directives, all  to do with the potential threat of the H1N1 virus.  What has really got teachers on the Supertanker riled though is the the potential threat to their sick leave entitlement should they be ’stood down’ for quarantine reasons in the near future.

It is clear from the dispatches from the Ministry front line that ducks are being lined up, should the expected pandemic arrive and the rhetoric from official sources is not if, but when.  We have all heard of this before with SARS but  nothing eventuated.  However, somehow this particular variant has whipped up more of a media frenzy than before.  The cynic in me thinks the H1N1 ‘crisis’ is a global smoke screen designed to take our attention away from the true crisis, the  financial free market morass created by years of  institutional greed and  global corporate contempt .  This is somewhat backed up by the statistics.  In the US, in an average year,  41 000 people die from the normal influenza virus, (go back and read that figure again).   To date the US has had 50 deaths from the H1N1 variant, not exactly cause for concern based on the previous figure, but don’t get me started on conspiracy theories!

So what has this to do with the Supertanker?

Today the lepers bell tolled in our vicinity, the dementors’ cold cloak of H1N1 has touched our wider community.  We are now a statistic on the global H1N1 map, which resembles my clustr map to the right.  The local day care centre reported its first case of suspected H1N1.  As a result several children were sent home, quarantined.  The whole unit may have been closed, but I am not sure. (12 students with the virus in Hong Kong has caused the territory to close all of  its primary schools for 14 days.)  One of the children at the unit is a child of one of the staff on the Supertanker and as a precaution both the staff member and the child have had to be checked for the symptoms, no doubt swabbed, prodded and made to go arrgh by a community nurse.  They are now at  home, whether the staff member has been stood down, quarantined or will be back tomorrow has yet to be seen.  And this brings me back to the loss of sick pay chuntering that has been raging this week in the staffroom.  About 8 of the staff on the Supertanker will be going overseas in the school holidays, mostly to Australia, the current hot spot for H1N1. As it stands if we are asked to voluntarily quarantine ourselves, if we show flu like symptoms, we will have our sick pay entitlement docked the 7 day stand down period.

The solution?  Should we be stood down for quarantine reasons, we can still teach remotely.  As those of you who read this blog regularly will know I have been teaching the students of Woodford Junior School in the UK on a regular basis for over two years.  Therefore, next week I will be running a whole staff meeting training the staff  how to use Dimdim, how to run lessons using the whiteboard, share documents and how to communicate with  the whole group or work privately 1:1 with attendees.  I will also show how to pass the ‘chair’ to other users and how to manage the audio and video functions.  Therefore, should we be stood down, we will not be losing our sick pay entitlement as we can still teach our classes, even if they have been quarantined too!  The school might be empty, but the lessons will continue.

Part 1 gave helpful pointers about what you should do before your upcoming webinar. Part 2 of this three-part series explores some tips and tricks that will help you get the most out of your webinar during the presentation. You’ve done your homework, you’ve worked hard on your delivery, and you have your audience captive. Here’s how to make the most of this opportunity.

1. Utilize a solid, industry-standard, universally accepted technology. Under no circumstances can you half-ass this. Your image and perception will be defined just as much by the production of your presentation as the presentation itself. No matter how pure your intentions are, it won’t mean Jack Squat if the technology fails. Do yourself a favor and invest a couple bucks in a known, proven commercial product. Here are my recommendations:
   • DimDim. This is a fairly new open source technology that works great and is gaining a large following. Free for up to 20 people, which is perfect for small or one-on-one webinars. If you need something a little larger, you can present to 50 people for just $25 for a month. These are the month-to-month, no commitment prices; the longer-term commitment prices are even lower.
   • WebEx: The whole world knows and uses WebEx, so you can’t go wrong if you choose them. They’re a bit pricier, but still dirt cheap in the grand scheme. They are also your technology of choice if you have a really large webinar. For $69 for a month (again, this is the month-to-month price) you can present to as many as 1,000 people. Frankly, if you’ve managed to assemble 1,000 people to attend your webinar, you can’t afford not to get WebEx.
2. Always make your webinars exactly one hour long. This is a standard length of time. Any shorter and it may feel rushed. Any longer and it starts to feel like a Fidel Castro speech to your attendees.
3. Never, ever be late. Be respectful of people’s schedules, so never start late, and never end late. ‘Nuff said.
4. Make it an open forum, not a closed sales pitch. After all, the purpose of the webinar is to develop leads, build your pipeline, and increase sales opportunities. Give your attendees the chance to ask questions and participate, which will make them more engaged and desirous to learn more. Do what you would naturally do if you were giving an in-person sales presentation.
5. Survey. This is a step that many webinar hosts forget to do. Before you finish, ask your attendees to complete a short survey regarding what they liked/disliked, whether they found the information to be worthwhile, if they’d recommend this to a friend, and whether they have additional questions. And make sure you capture their contact information. If they’ve stuck with you for the entire hour, chances are very good they’re hot leads, so you’ll get a very high survey completion rate. If they’ve asked to be contacted, follow up with them as soon as possible, preferably within 24 hours.

Tomorrow – Part 3, which will focus on what to do after your webinar has concluded. Stay tuned!

For web and video conferencing  Wacom pen tablets and interactive pen displays are intuitive input devices to get most out of the whiteboard features.  Different pens, highlighters and other presentation tools can be used to draw attention to and stress certain details during a web conference. Working with online conferencing applications such as Adobe Connect, DimDim, MSN Messenger, WebEx or Digital Samba means that all participants can share and sketch ideas when thousands of miles away. Web-based training with customers or students becomes more lively and interactive.

I have done some tests with WebEx using the whiteboard and annotations functions in different applications during a web conference.  During the test I have done some screen shots that should give you an impression of different use scenarios.

A) Using the WebEx Whiteboard. This is maybe a tool for teachers in distance learning sessions.

B) Annotations over your browser application while sharing a map

C) Telemedicine:  Sharing and highlighting medical images

D) Sharing a presentation. Here you can either use the WebEx annotation tools or better the Powerpoint annotations tool that you are availeble  in the presenter mode. 

For these tests I have used a Bamboo  pen tablet.  For online lectures or frequent use in conferencing rooms I would rather recommend an interactive pen display:

Of all ill effect of recession, there is one good things which always happens: that, it opens up new business opportunities and new doors. Now is no different. Thoughtful and forward looking organizations will have to take some tough and very smart decision to overcome the obstacles, which is thrown upon them due to recession.

In this age, organizations can ill afford to avoid technologies or more precisely upgrading it. With the cash/credit crunch unprecedented, it is imperative for organizations to look into alternatives. Easier target in this time is to reduce the IT cost, which is not so bad from organization operational perspective. However, companies which will survive this time will the ones who can move forward or in this case look for alternatives.

Thankfully, there are solutions which are available and supported by millions all over the world, which are cheaper, much simpler, and almost always smarter and can do what a commercially available solutions can at much lesser cost. Yes! I am talking about Open-Source solutions. Conventional wisdom says open source solutions are for educational institutions, big shot universities etc… reason being that for a long time open source solutions were ahead of its time (Remember LINUX, APACHE). Since, open source solutions were being ahead of time it is perceived as it will be more complicated than the comparative commercially available solutions (Thus the big shot universities theory). Like all argument, truth lies at neither side but somewhere in middle. Even for open source there were some truths in conventional wisdom; reasons being earlier, majority of open source were directed towards changing the face of the industry (Thus relative complications). However, market demands simple and effective solutions and slowly and surely open source communities realized this. Last three to four years were like dream run for open source, lots of new tools, software, simple scripts which can do simple tasks has been developed. Also, Older and more established tools and solutions have been modified keeping the audience in mind. What this has done is open source has become more acceptable to the end user.

One thing that has gone unnoticed is the organized way in which open-source works now. This has a democratic feel, the organized one. What this does is open source solutions today works in much organized way than how it used to work even two years ago. Open source today is much smarter, simple and most important is tries to solve one problem at a time. What this has done is there are communities and companies who specialize in one kind of open source solution rather than anything and everything. An example of this is developers of Facebook application, the ones who develop wordpress plug-in. Organization who are experts in providing open source CRM solutions to organizations who develop web applications based on open source platforms such as DRUPAL or JOOMLA. For organizations conference requirement there is DIMDIM, the list is endless. Another open source roadblock in the organization mindset is support is nonexistent, which used to be true to some extent when open source were trying to solve world hunger problem. Now since open source communities is sticking to good old solving problems one at a time, Organizations that do custom open source development provide service and support just like any commercially available solutions providers. Open source is not free, open source is customizable to an organizational need because code is available for modification. This is the unique power of open source which reduces dependencies in long run.

Does this mean organizations jump into open source bandwagon right away? NO, there are reason and customer limitations which do not allow one to go ahead with open source all the time. If you are a CTO or make IT related decision for your organization, best thing to do is to identify few problems or few areas where a change will not have much of an impact than engage with open source vendors to see if you can get a similar open source solution. From my experience as open source consultant be sure to be pleasantly surprised. Depending upon how it goes take your next step.

Getting into open source is like getting into lesser known water for swimming you need to take measured step at first and when you are comfortable dive fully. And remember to solve one problem at a time.

This is taken from my blog @ http://www.ujjawal.com